The Effect of Stimulus Arrangements on Normative Judgment in the Award of Penal Sanctions

Abstract

The sentences imposed in consecutive criminal cases are analyzed in terms of psychophysical theory. The findings reveal that the severity of the individual sentence relative to the sentences imposed in legally equivalent cases tends to shift significantly toward the relative severity of the sentence in the preceding case; the greater the similitude in substantive legal makeup between the two cases, the more pronounced is the shift. The displacements in judgment result from changes in the affective rather than the cognitive component of attitudes and suggest an operational model of the juridical concept of judicial temperament. The direction of the shift toward rather than away from the judgment in the preceding case and the powerful effect of the recency of the prior stimulation illustrate the socio-psychological foundation of the legal principle of stare decisis. This is a report of an inquiry into the effect of stimulus arrangements upon normative judgment in a natural social setting. The medium of investigation consists of sentences meted out by criminal court judges to convicted offenders. The study deals in particular with the effect of the individual judge's assessment of the gravity of preceding cases upon variance in the gravity of the sentences imposed in succeeding cases. Whereas the lore of the legal profession attributes the disparity in sentences for cases of equivalent legal makeup to the vagaries of temperament, this study proposes that deviation from self-consistency derives substantially from a continuous shifting in the individual judge's standard of judgment produced by the variation in seriousness between consecutive cases disposed of in the daily docket of the court. The theoretical framework of this study rests upon a foundation of experimentation which reveals the systematic operation of general processes underlying variability in judgment, whether in the physical, esthetic, or ethical modalities of experience (Sherif, and Hovland et al., 1961 provide a concise synthesis of the literature concerning the psychodynamics of judgment). The results of that research show that scales of judgment develop out of the repeated experiencing of stimuli of a particular type within a given range of